I was writing up a pitch about effective discipline strategies and I remembered that in addition to the wooden spoons that my mother would use to slap me on my inner thigh and the belts that snapped across my cousins behinds, throughout my childhood it was not unheard for someone to be hit with a vegetable.

The most memorable time was when my uncle chased my cousin with an zucchini. She must have done something really bad, probably cursed at him or something and he became so enraged he chased her up their spiral staircase with it in his hand. My cousins and I watched in astonishment as he double-skipped the stairs with a green vegetable big enough to win a prize at a country fair. He was a big man and they had a spiral staircase. I’m still not sure what he had planned on doing with the zucchini. Beat her with it? I doubt he even knew but grabbing the vegetable off the kitchen counter sent an indelible message: Be afraid. His anger knows no bounds.

But he can’t be singled out. Once when my brother, Andre and I were having dinner at my grandparents house, my grandfather was feeding their poodle, Truffy, broccoli from the table. He was a little hard of hearing and my grandmother kept saying, “Mike stop feeding the dog. Stop feeding the dog Mike.” But he didn’t hear her so instead she just took a head of celery and whacked on his bald head. Andre choked on his soup. We knew better to laugh but it was funny. Grandpa look up annoyed and turned to my grandmother who was still holding the celery and asked, “What you do that for?”

I was talking to my mother on the phone and I were going over these stories and she said, “Oh yeah, its nothing, don’t you remember Grandma Connie used to spank you with an ear of corn?”

Uh no.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, March 24th, 2010 at 5:46 pm and is filed under Random acts of mothering. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.